


Put to Rest

by Svynakee



Category: 91 Days (Anime)
Genre: M/M, hahaha wtf, i am in pineapple hell, mentions of... sex?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 06:21:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8738125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Svynakee/pseuds/Svynakee
Summary: The air is cold. The river is dark. The morning is quiet. And Angelo takes time for a cigarette and a conversation with a friend.





	

**Author's Note:**

> what the fuck have i written
> 
> why is he called angelo? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Angelo lights his cigarette and throws the match into the river below. He tracks the orange-gold flame as it is swallowed up by dark water. Everything is quiet in the cool twilight of early morning. He exhales.

There is a movement out of the corner of his eye. Angelo doesn’t turn; his gaze remains eastward over the water, waiting for the dawn. He sees Corteo enter his peripheral vision; the man leans amiably on the railing beside him, a small smile on his face.

As Angelo takes another drag of his cigarette, Corteo says in his quiet voice, “You could leave Nero right now. Come with me. You could leave all of this behind.”

There’s no more bite to it, after all the times Corteo has made the suggestion and been turned down. Angelo knows that he’s just saying it out of habit. Instead of replying immediately, Angelo focuses on the feel of the soothing smoke in his lungs, the chill of the wind against his face, the freshness of the breeze. The quietness of the world.

“We’re brothers.” Smoke curls out of his mouth along with the words to dissipate into the morning mist.

Corteo actually scoffs at him. “I thought  _ we _ were brothers.”

There’s still a hint of hurt and accusation in there. It feels like the impact of banknotes against his back. It feels like the cold, metal weight of a gun in his hand.

Angelo shrugs, then winces at the way the movement pulls at his right shoulder. He used to be better at hiding pain. But the stoic façade that he had mastered was getting rusty – it must be the salty sea air.

Corteo gives him a look that sort of says ‘serves you right’ with the tiniest hint of ‘be more careful’. His friend is standing there with his hands on his hips, demanding… something.

Answers? Angelo isn’t sure he has any. But under that bespectacled glare he scrabbles to cobble one out of the jumbled fragments his life has become.  _ We were brothers. _

“It wasn’t a lie. It was never a lie,” Angelo insists. And that… is the truth. It was never a lie, to either of them. The key to deception was to anchor it with a touch of truth. Just a light brush to give it the shine of reality to hide the reek of falsehood. “We are brothers.”

Was it possible to become so used to lying that you managed to con yourself?

Corteo shakes his head at the pathetic mess Angelo has become. “Right. And people fuck their brothers.”

Angelo actually drops his cigarette, which has the audacity to roll between the railings and down into the river. The words hang between them like the ringing impact of a gunshot. Angelo can feel the heat of the blush colour his cheeks, which was ridiculous, really. So what. He slept with Nero. It doesn’t even come close to the top of the list of all the fucked up shit he has done in his life – and it’s one of the few things on that list that feels good enough for him not to care.

There’s some tiny part of his mind, one that Angelo tries to drown in alcohol and work and guilt, that knows that it’s because it’s not  _ just fucking _ . But Angelo always clamps down on the thought right then and there – pulls the trigger, crosses his fingers in the hopes that it dies.

It doesn’t.

It comes back, with a vengeance. One day, he’s pretty sure he’ll have to deal with it in all its matured glory and watch it rip his life apart.

But not today.

“I’m sorry,” Angelo says.

“To who?” he hears Corteo ask. “For what?”

“Do I need a reason?” It’s disturbing how easily those words roll off his tongue now. He can almost taste Nero every time he says them. And then he yearns for a taste of something cheap and fiery to wash it away, along with the ensuing headache that comes every time he thinks about Nero.

Corteo’s familiar exasperated, nagging voice doesn’t help his growing migraine. “To apologise to someone? Yes, Angelo, you  _ do _ . What’s the point if you don’t even mean it? What’s the point of feeling sorry for yourself?”

If he really got down to it, Angelo would have to admit that the reason why he insists on feeling sorry for himself was because he isn’t dead, and that he should be dead, but once you got involved with stupid, unpredictable, lively  _ Nero _ all your plans got spectacularly derailed, engines ploughing on into the unknown on the fuel of adrenaline and morbid curiosity.

You didn’t need a reason to live. You just lived.

And that is why Angelo very adamantly refuses to acknowledge that maybe, somehow, he has found a reason to live. And he definitely isn’t going to put a name on it, because that name is four letters long and has too much baggage for him to deal with.

Angelo scowls. His cigarette is gone, the morning chill is starting to set into his skin – why didn’t he put on a coat, he should have just dragged it out from underneath that idiot’s stupid heavy body, even if it did wake him up – and he doesn’t like how damn  _ philosophical  _ this is getting. He remembered a time when Corteo barely spoke to him at all. “What did you want to say to me, anyway?”

Corteo gives him a smile. He raises a single hand and gave him the four-fingered wave that is burned into Angelo’s mind, from all those sleepless nights a lifetime ago. “Goodbye.”

“What?” Angelo reaches out to grab Corteo’s shirt and stops just shy of his fingers brushing thin air. “What the fuck do you mean by  _ goodbye? _ ”

“I mean that it’s time for me to go. Actually, I should have gone a long time ago.” Corteo turns his face away from Angelo to watch the first light of sunrise filter through the gaps in the buildings across the river. “It’s already April, Angelo.”

“Is this supposed to be some kind of birthday present, then?” Angelo’s had enough goodbyes on his birthday to last a lifetime, but he can’t begrudge his former friend for a final jab at his fractured conscience. It probably hurts less than a bullet to the chest anyway.

“No, I’ve got a message. From all of us,” Corteo says as he turns to face Angelo. “I didn’t cross the river just so you could mope around like this. You’ll come home eventually. We can wait. But some things won’t. So: just live.”

Angelo can’t stop himself from chuckling. “That sounds wrong, coming from you.”

“Well that just goes to show, doesn’t it?” Corteo’s voice is a lot fainter now, like the echoes of a dream. “It’s time for me to go.  _ He’s _ your brother now…”

The sun rises, its golden light chasing the night’s shadows away.

Angelo barely gets half a moment of peace before he hears Nero’s voice boom out, “So that’s where you went!” The man shivers dramatically. “You’re going to catch your death of cold brooding out here.”

“Good, it’ll spare me from your snoring,” Angelo immediately replies, and obstinately goes back to leaning on the railing. The metal leaches the warmth from his arms and he has to repress a shiver himself – he’d barely noticed the bite of the chill before Nero and his stupid theatrics. The man has a way of making everything seem realer; of peeling back the numbness that Angelo painstakingly wraps around himself to reach the vulnerable rawness he traps beneath.

Angelo doesn’t flinch like he used to when he feels strong, warm arms wrap around his waist. He tries to ignore the way Nero’s broad chest presses against his back and chases the chill out of his spine. He attempts to recall a time when feeling the man’s breath against his neck would have elicited fear and disgust out of him, instead of a mild, comfortingly familiar sense of resignation.  

Nero’s loud voice in the mornings still grate on his nerves like no other, though. Right beside his ear, Nero says – which for Nero, is more like a bellow, “Not much hope of that I fear. I remember you saying last month that my snoring could wake the dead.”

Maybe it could. Maybe it did.

“Then I should just throw you in the river,” Angelo replies.

“Not unless you want to take a swim, too,” Nero says, squeezing Angelo tightly. The boisterous man’s chin comes to rest on Angelo’s shoulder, causing him to yelp partially in pain but mostly to make Nero release him, which the man does with such lightning speed it almost seems that he’d bounced. “Sorry, sorry! I keep forgetting!”

Angelo throws him a mock glare, which Nero mock recoils from. “I’m going inside.”

“But it’s a beautiful day!”

“Great. I’ll be sleeping.”

Nero groans like a buffalo trying to play the trombone. “That’s such a  _ boring  _ way to spend the day?”

Angelo scoffs, his hand already on the doorknob. Glancing back over his shoulder at Nero he says, “And why do you care?”

In a voice loud enough to be heard all the way back in Lawless, Nero announces, “Because I’m going to spend the day with you!”

The door slams shut on Nero’s sunbeam grin. The click of the lock is loud in the morning silence.

And, inside the small but cosy flat that they shared, Angelo tries to ignore a warmth in his chest that had nothing to do with cigarette smoke.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> they went to live in a seaside city but were too damn poor to buy a house with a seaside view
> 
> they work as clowns
> 
> nero as the juggling kind, angelo as the kind that gives kids nightmares
> 
> their son is a can of pineapples. it just celebrated its 5th birthday.


End file.
